What Happened With The NBN This Week?

POLITICAL S-S-S-SMACKDOWN! It's the fight of the political century ladies and gentlemen, as this week we saw Senator Stephen Conroy and Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull go head to head on national television. FIGHT.

In the blue corner: he's a one-time Liberal party leader with a point to prove about telecommunications...Malcolm "The Cable Cutter" Tuuuuuuuuurnbuuuuuuulllll! Meanwhile in the red corner: he's recently backed out of a controversial internet filtering plan and blames his kids for messing with his iPhone: Stephen "The Fibrenator" Conrooooooooooooooyyyyy!

The arena? ABC's Lateline program. The stakes? The tech credibility of each major political party. The fight? Bloody and petty.

The two political heavyweights duked it out on Lateline this week, with neither showing any sign of ceding precious ground to the other.

Amidst the squabbling, Turnbull did reveal that the base cost of the Coalition's broadband plan came in at $15 million, while Stephen Conroy assured the viewers that despite what you've heard, the NBN is on track.

There's lots of "hold on a moment", "let me answer the question" and graph presenting for you to enjoy in the full interview.

Meanwhile, iiNet this week released a cheeky statement saying it was "number one in Fibre in Australia" after claiming to have connected 8000 iiNet customers to fibre through the TransACT network it bought a while back (which were already connected to fibre, mind) and a further 2700 connected to the NBN. Clever foxes.

Finally, Telstra has confirmed that it will start taking orders for NBN voice and data services this week.

NBNCo isn't an ISP though. They resell the service to other companies, like iiNet, who provide the service to customers. So therefore iiNet is indeed number 1 in fibre as you can't actually connect to NBNCo directly.

There IS no alternative to Labour's fibre plan. As always all we have is poor, tired old Turnbull trying to do his best to smudge up one of the bright sparks of Labour's achievements and so use that to win potential votes.
There IS no debate on the issue, just people (on both sides) miss-using press about it and spin in the lead up to the federal election.

It still remains essential infrastructure, no amount of bluster has changed that.
It's like arguing against climate change - you're only playing to an audience of idiots.

An alternative would be to not spend a mind blowing amount of tax payers money on it. Hang on, we aren't. It's all borrowed. And we will be paying it back until the day we die. Tired old Liberals piss less money away. That's not an opinion. It's fact. And why bring up climate change? Is it so people can be called NBN Deniers?

"NBN Deniers"? Good name! ^_^
It's basic infrastructure, we need it, we're getting it. The pissing and whining isn't changing that, it's only purpose is to swing votes from those who imagine it will.
Like any important infrastructure; it's expensive, but needed so you wear it. And it's money saved in the long term because it's a good, solid foundation so it's easy to build on and upgrade.
The fantasy alternatives Turnbul talks about would cost us all far, far more over the course of the next 30 years or so.

The connection with climate change is that like the NBN it's something the foremost experts in the field agree on and only paid shills or short term thinkers come out against,

Perhaps it's 'pissing money away' to you but that's a rather subjective view don't you think? how much do you use the net? how fast is it where you're living now? It's all very well to say the internet's fine as is... if you live 30 feet from your local exchange, in a metropolitan area where lines are good, or with an area that has good 4G (another facet of the NBN i might add).

But realistically the rest of us have to put up with shitty speeds and the monopoly that telstra has on the fixed line network. I concur with other statements that have been made, that the NBN is a necessary infrastructure and that the and slandering going on have been nothing more then verbal cockfights to secure the next vote.

The mere fact that liberal has been changing it's story since the beginning (first it was the net's fine as is, then it was an alternate to labours plan once the hard figures came out and they realized the network was choking), plus its refusal to come up with solid facts to back up its claims make me think that while still trying to get the vote, liberal wants labours plan to go ahead. I mean seriously what can you do when you realize the other guy has been right all along they're doing the right thing only they thought of it before you? Try an steal the work and the thunder of course.

So then you may say ok say we are to believe this where is the delay coming from? Well apart from liberal mindf**king people into believing that fiber is a bad idea, i'd say the electrical companies are the biggest obstacle since they have the most to lose once this venture is completed. I shall elaborate for those that aren't as technically minded as my fellow network engineers and i.

As you may or may not know an enormous amount of power is required to propagate signals over copper lines whether to carry phone signals or be converted to DC, there is a lot of waste. By contrast fiber requires very little power to send vast amounts of data VERY quickly and it's reliable as it's immune to EMF. On top of that most tech is getting more eco friendly (fab processes on electronic components are getting smaller). Whether they like it or not electric companies are going to be facing heavy loss in future that is why ridiculous claims have been made like 'having the fiber on phone lines will increase power consumption' and the $140 usage fee of telephone poles in NSW all that cost is to buffer the expected loss once the network takes off.

It must be hard for an opposition to oppose government's policy, such as the NBN, knowing that its vital to Australia's interests and yet still opposing it because you're trying to make the policy look bad.

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